Rediscovering what might have been in Lost States

Published 12:00 am, Wednesday, April 7, 2010

When Michael J. Trinklein was a child, he read a Newsweek story about a move to break off the Upper Peninsula of Michigan into its own state, to be called Superior.

"I thought, 'Wow! You could do that? That could happen? America can change?' " said Trinklein, a documentary filmmaker and former college professor who lives in Wisconsin.

That article set him on a quest. For several years, he searched for stories from all over the country about failed efforts to forge new states, mostly by having regions break away and set up housekeeping on their own. He has finally collected those stories into a book: Lost States: True Stories of Texlahoma, Transylvania and Other States That Never Made It (Quirk Books, $24.95).

Most Popular

"A lot of these people are blustering to get attention," he said. "But I think there is an underlying notion that maps reflect our struggles and, with a lot of these lost state proposals, behind them is a story to be told about what people are thinking in a particular area."

The book, written with snap and a fair amount of snarkiness, covers the nation, but a good portion deals specifically with Texas. (There's a reason an entire section is devoted to "division of Texas" in the Handbook of Texas, an online repository for all things Lone Star maintained by the Texas State Historical Association.)

Among the Texas proposals Lost States includes:

ò A German outpost, to be named Adelsverein, in present-day New Braunfels. Trinklein says German immigrants had hoped to form their own nation or state.

ò Sam Houston's proposal to give a swath of land in the middle of the state to the Comanches.

ò R¿o Rico, a tiny island in the Rio Grande that had been a hot spot during Prohibition because it was believed to be on Mexican soil. It was later discovered to be in U.S. territory after the river was diverted, shifting the boundary line.

A 1969 proposal from state Sen. V.E. "Red" Berry that would have split the state into Texas and South Texas, because, as he saw it, the north was primarily white, Protestant and rich and the south was poor, Catholic and Hispanic. San Antonio would have been the capital of South Texas.

The book also discusses the provision, made when the U.S. annexed Texas, that allows the state to be divided into as many as five states, though it doesn't touch on Gov. Rick Perry's 2009 assertion that Texas could secede.

"I have a book published a century ago (called) Social Cleavages in Texas that's 400 pages about Texas' attempts to be sliced up," Trinklein said.

That's where he found the account of an 1860 proposal to turn East Texas into an area to be called Jacinto, after the famed battle.

Trinklein said the big issue that stopped most plans to break up the state was the question of which area would retain the name: "There's a certain prestige in being from Texas that negated a lot of the attempts to split Texas."

Trinklein hopes his book turns readers on to geography and disabuses them of the notion that "Moses came down with 10 commandments and 50 states."

"I thought geography was a lot of fun and wanted to share it with people," he said. "What triggered it for me is, Barack Obama and I are the same age, and he is the first president who had not seen a new state added in his lifetime. (Before), we were always adding more states; it was, 'Should we let Vermont in or not?' I was of a generation that never saw that."